20 June 2005

The First Week

Last night was the last night of my first week as a college "graduate". Have I worked on my papers? Nope. Will I? You'd better believe it. So, what's different?

I've been forcing myself to make time to do several things, two in particular. First, I've been making time to read; not much, just six or seven pages per night before bed. As a history major, I was expected to read quite a bit in many of my courses, and that made it all but impossible to do any recreational reading. Since I wasn't making time to do the amount of reading I needed to do for class, I couldn't bring myself to squander my time on recreational books. That's over, and though I have papers to work on, I'm reading Moonraker by Ian Fleming. It's absolutely nothing like that film, save for Hugo Drax's name. I have a short list of books that I intend to read in the coming months.

  • "Confessions" by St. Augustine
  • "Mere Christianity" by C.S. Lewis
  • "The Sparrow" by Maria Doria Russell
  • "The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien
  • "Black Hawk Down" by Mark Bowden

    In no particular order, and there's more as well. At the end of my freshman year of college, after having read a couple of books, I figured out that I could educate myself in an unorthodox manner by reading a lot of books. Right now there are one hundred fifty one books on my official list, which I'd show you folks if I could trust the rest of the people on the Internet. The point, though, is that I'm able to read for recreation at long last.

    The second thing that I've been making time to do is read the Bible. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those holy roller boneheads. I'm a filthy sinner, saved through wholly undeserved grace from God. I've long thought it important to read the Bible on a daily basis, so I've been reading Acts, one chapter at a time. I read it in the morning, and reread the same chapter in the evening right before bed.

    Of course, there are other things I want to do regularly. With a little perseverence, tomorrow initiates my return to a regular workout plan. I'm going to start off with this, and eventually jump over to this and eventually complemented by this. I started gaining weight during my junior year of college, having stopped my regular workout program after my stint with the Navy ended. It's important to me to return to the best physical condition I can possibly attain.

    My life is changing, and it's a strange feeling. Aside from that, though, it's a wonderful to have the opportunity to prove that I wasn't just lazy about those important things that I failed to do with any regularity in college; I had a legitimate conflict of schedule, and that issue is (at least temporarily) resolved. It's pretty damn motivating.

    This morning, once I'm ready to leave the house, I'll head to campus and pay my (theoretically speaking) last bill, buy my last textbook (for the Arabic course I'm sitting in on), and pay for my last term at the campus recreation center. Here we go...
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